


The Fall and Rebirth of Gar Ignius

by GhonkDroid



Category: Star Wars Legends - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Original Character(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-22
Updated: 2020-06-07
Packaged: 2021-03-02 22:09:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24314053
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GhonkDroid/pseuds/GhonkDroid
Summary: Gar Ignius is an arrogant Jedi who is broken beyond all reason and left to die.





	1. Betrayed

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A jedi stationed on Kamino starts to learn the truth about the clone control chips.

Gar Ignus thought himself all but invincible. A newly-minted Jedi Knight, he had completed all of his Trials without a hitch, all while serving as the apprentice to Plo Koon. Surely, he would soon select a Padawan of his own, and become a Master just as easily. It came as a massive shock when, before he was able to select a Padawan, he was assigned to guard some cloning labs on Kamino. Apparently the Republic’s army would be created there, as opposed to conscripted, and they needed to ensure that no tampering or sabotage would be attempted. As his shuttle descended through the dark storm clouds of Kamino, he couldn’t help but notice the absurdity of this post. The seas of Kamino, though geologically recent additions to the planet, were filled with beasts that could easily rip any saboteurs to shreds. Given these intrinsic defenses, any attempts to sabotage clone production would require either an extremely obvious intrusion (there are only a few landing pads per city, any assailants would be screened at easy-to-defend positions anyway), or an assault so ferocious and large-scale that a lone Jedi and some fresh Clones would be unable to repel. In short, Gar knew that the Council had selected him to attempt to teach humility.  _ Well, no matter _ , the Jedi thought. He would fulfill his orders to the letter, and once there was a sizable population of clones such that they could defend themselves, he would certainly be transferred back, where he could finally begin ascending the ranks once again. Content with this reasoning, he put up his hood and stepped out into the rain.

The rain was a constant on Kamino. When it was bearable to go outside, Gar would spend hours meditating on the edge of a walkway overlooking the ocean, trying to connect with the Force on a planet where there seemed to be no such thing as calm. The only possible saboteurs that ever came were a couple of Neimoidians that attempted to force their way into the compound, citing that “The independent systems will know what crimes against nature are being committed here”. Gar didn’t even have a chance to apprehend them, as the burgeoning clone garrison handled them before he had a chance to respond. Not that life inside the Kaminoan facility was any more stimulating. When trying to describe the place to his master, who he frequently spoke to via hologram, he could only muster the word  _ sterile _ . White halls with stark while lights made up the entirety of the lab; the only places that broke with the color scheme were the glass walkways overlooking the cloning vats. It was here that Gar could often be found, desperate for a change of scenery. He could spend hours observing the clones being grown, and he wondered what life would be like as one of them. No parents, no home that wasn’t with a platoon off in some remote corner of the galaxy, fighting legions of droids all in order to preserve the “democracy” that the Republic tried to maintain. To Gar, the creation of these clones was intriguing; how could science create so many beings that not even the Force could? And so, Gar found himself studying the Kaminoans’ methods, for if anything they provided him with entertainment. It was during this time that he discovered that the clones had a bioelectrical chip implanted into them, but he could not figure out why. The Kaminoans claimed that the chips inhibited some of the more violent emotions that were present due to the cloning process, but Gar could always sense that they were hiding something from him. So he dug deep into the files, pored over thousands of pages of reports, looking for a slip-up on the Kaminoans’ part, looking for the real reason why the chips existed. One day, he found a reference to Clone contingency 66, and how a failure in one of the biochips had caused a clone to prematurely initiate said protocol, though he could not find out what the protocol consisted of. Unaware that the Kaminoans were secretly monitoring the logs of his terminal, he continued to search for any scraps of information. 

Gar never saw them coming. In retrospect, he should have been more prudent to expect an attack at any time, but to jump him while he slept? It certainly complicated things. Before he was able to call his saber to his side, a stun blast knocked him back onto the bed, and he reeled as he saw two tall, pale figures stand over him. He tried desperately to reach out and subdue his assailants with the Force, but that blast must have shattered his concentration, as nothing happened to his captors. They bound him, blindfolded him, and dragged him through the hallways into the lower levels of the facility. As they moved, he could sense a dark presence arriving on the landing pad, and he tried to do anything to get the clones’ attention. He could sense them around him, so why had they not come to his aid? Finally, his Kaminoan captors brought him to a small room and threw him onto the floor, before leaving and sealing the door. He managed to squirm and shift so that the blindfold was pushed up a bit, allowing him to see. As the door opened, he could feel the dark presence approaching, encompassing his thoughts until all he could feel was the blackness of the void. He was filled with fear as a small hooded figure entered the room. It spoke:

“Greetings young Ignius. It appears that you have been doing some studying while here on Kamino.” 

The raspy voice of Darth Sidious filled Gar’s ears. He recognized the voice, having heard Palpatine’s speech when he had become Supreme Chancellor, but he thought that the voice sounded too gravelly to belong to a human. Palpatine continued.

“And you were close to discovering the secret that would have saved your Order, I commend you for your ethic.”

“P-Palpatine?” Ignius replied.

The Sith let out a cackle. “Oh please, let us do without these false names. Call me Sidious. Darth Sidious.”   
  


It was at this moment that the crushing realization of what was happening hit Gar, and he began to thrash against his restraints. “You… The Council will find out what you are, and what you’re doing!”

“I’d love to see them try. But I would focus more on what is going to happen to you right now.”   
  
Gar managed a smirk. “What, are you going to kill me? I don’t fear death, Sith”

“Oh, quite the opposite, you see. I’m going to shatter your faith in that obsolete religion you so desperately cling to.” Sidious paused. “Maybe then will you be useful to me.”   
  
“I’ll never join scum like you!” Gar managed, fighting to stay conscious.

Palpatine chuckled, before knocking out Gar with the Force. “They always say that in the beginning.”


	2. Broken

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gar's will is broken by the Sith. There is no end to the creativity of the torture.

Time seemed to have lost all meaning. How long had he spent in his dimly lit cell, days, weeks, months? Time didn’t matter any more; it ceased to exist. The only way Gar knew that time was passing was the ebb and flow of his pain. As soon as he had been taken off the shuttle, he could feel the heat of flowing lava around him; this must be where Palpatine kept his enemies. At first, the treatment was little more than solitary confinement. The heat was uncomfortable and the cell was pitch black, but Gar could retreat into the Force and escape his misery. That seemed to anger Palpatine, as he began to take a more… direct approach to breaking the jedi. Force-muting cuffs severed his connection and his only means of escape from that wretched cell, and the Chancellor would mock him, taunting him to free himself if he truly was a Jedi. 

“Come on then, you claimed to be an illustrious Jedi on path to becoming a Master? Where are your powers?” He snarled in between rounds of lightning.

“I-I’ll never break, monster” Gar weakly spat out, though he was having a hard time remaining conscious. As the electricity coursed through his veins, his mind slowly fried, until all he could think of, all he could hope on, was gone. Tasting death in his mouth, he could not think of anything else, anything other than getting out of this cell. At first he screamed, though his vocal cords were quickly rendered raw and unusable.   
  
“Not ready to submit yet? I can still sense an inkling of willpower.” Palpatine chuckled, looking deep into Gar’s eyes and seeing fear. “Though soon you will bend. See you tomorrow. ” As he closed the door behind him, Gar was left in complete darkness, though he could not sleep.

Each day progressively got worse. Palpatine’s creativity never ceased to amaze Gar, though it was the lack of ability to even commune with the Force that left Gar fearful. Surely, the Jedi would send for him. They had to be searching for him, _right?_ This small sliver of hope is what kept him going through the pain and misery. 

Then one day, Palpatine had had enough. As he strode into the cell, Gar could hear a second set of footsteps being dragged behind him. Palpatine stopped, and the new figure fell to the floor, her hood falling off to reveal a young girl. Before Gar could say anything, the Chancellor spoke.

“You will see just how useless the Jedi truly are. You once showed promise, no? You had power?” He revealed a lightsaber, hidden in his cloak, and placed it on Gar’s Force cuffs. “We shall see if they have really trained you to use your power”. Without touching it, he ignited the scarlet blade. Gar’s eyes shot wide open as he realized what he was going to make him do.

“P-p-please… mercy. I submit, you’ve won Palpatine, just don’t hurt her.”  
  
The Sith let out a soft laugh. “There is no mercy.” he said, as he began to push the young girl’s face forward toward the lightsaber. “After all, I’m not going to be hurting her, _you_ are.”

“Stop! I’ll tell you anything, I’ll do anything, just don’t make me hurt her!”

Palpatine paused, and softly spoke a sentence that shattered Gar.

“What if hurting her is the only thing I want you to do?”

Gar couldn’t speak. He couldn’t act. His powers failed him, and all he could do was look at the girl as the lightsaber entered her neck and exited through the other side. He was powerless, unable to do his _one_ duty in the galaxy. He felt an incredible surge of rage overtake him, the first time he had felt anything but despair on this planet, and the cuffs opened, as the girl’s corpse flopped onto the floor. He tried to tackle Palpatine, but the old man swiftly blasted him with lightning, frying his nervous system and sending him flying into the wall. As he towered over the fallen Jedi, the Sith grinned.

“You are finally ready to accept the Dark Side. Come, and I shall show you power the likes of which you could only imagine.”

Mustering all of his strength, Gar summoned the Force and used it to help himself stand. Something was wrong, something was different. Where he once felt elation and comfort, the Force only reminded him of his failure. It was like seeing the world through a filter, everything was just _slightly_ off.

“You just made me kill someone, what makes you think I’m going to let you teach me anything?”

Palpatine narrowed his eyes.

“Very well, then die on this planet. It matters little to me, I have found a promising apprentice who is eager to learn.” He swiftly turned and stormed off, leaving Gar alone with the corpse. The effort of standing was too much for Gar, and he passed out.

Upon waking, Gar knew that he was stranded on this world. If a Sith had maintained this installation for so long, then there’s no way anyone would have been able to locate it and compromise his plans. As he limped through the facility, he found other rooms, making a mental note of storerooms. He came across an unmarked room and peeked inside, there may have been communications equipment that he could use to signal for help. There was no equipment; Palpatine has no need for such primitive methods of communication, though the room did contain… cribs? _What has this man been up to?_ Gar thought, as he struggled his way through the hallways. Finding a door, he ventured outside and was immediately blinded. Compared to the pitch-black of his cell, even the relative dimness of the surface was overwhelming. 

For the first time since arriving on this fiery world, Gar Ignius felt a connection to the Force. Not the universal Living Force of the Jedi, but the Force of the planet. Abandoned by both the Jedi and even the Sith, he would learn from this planet. It had given him a surge of energy to stand against Palpatine; surely it could do more.

He would thrive.


	3. Reborn

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Learning from the planet he has been stranded on, Gar Ignius lives up to his name.

_ What was once great is rendered small. _ These words would echo through Gar’s head as he worked to set up a living area in a cave close to the now-abandoned facility. Despite the nearby lava flows, the cave was somehow cooler than that horrid cell that he had been held in. Palpatine’s facility held, after an extensive search by Gar, quite extensive stores of food and water.  _ Clearly, I was not the only intended prisoner _ , he thought, but no one else ever manifested. Whatever he had been up to, Palpatine had abandoned.  _ Like me. He made me kill an innocent girl, and then the bastard left me. _ Gar cursed the Sith, cursed the Jedi, cursed everything that had abandoned him here. Rocks and lava would serve as his bed, his home, his life.

The only constant he had now was the planet. It was harsh and unforgiving, but at least it didn’t abandon him. Gar would meditate as often as possible, trying to draw the planet into himself. Allowing himself to connect with this small manifestation of the Force, it proved useful. In addition to staving off the effects of hunger that manual labor imposed on him, it allowed him to understand the primordial makeup of the land around him, which sharpened his control over the landscape.  _ So much knowledge from such a barren land _ , he thought.  _ If only the Jedi would stop fighting this war, they could learn so much from every planet.  _

Not that the manual labor wasn’t enjoyable; it gave Gar something to do when he had exhausted his mind connecting with the planet. In addition to trekking to Palpatine’s facility to gather supplies, he manipulated the lava and rock with the Force to create a relatively peaceful spot jutting out over a magma field. This perch offered a breathtaking view, and Gar would try to mediate here. The vulnerability of not being in his cave required Gar to surrender himself more completely to the planet, to let less and less stand between him and it. 

As he was meditating, his perch began to wobble. It began to crack, but Gar did not notice, he was too far connected to the planet to feel this minute detail. It was only when his ledge began to fall that he noticed something was wrong. Scared, he was about to sever his connection and return to his body when he felt the Force speak to him:  _ Stay. You are safe. You are One with Mustafar. _ Gar did the only thing the Jedi had properly trained him for before abandoning him. He surrendered fully to this world, not caring that he was falling into lava, not caring that he would probably die. As the Force willed it, so it would be. Merging his essence with the planet’s, Gar was indeed safe.

He could not tell exactly how long he spent like this. Compared to his mortal life, the planet was ancient, and time was not necessarily important. He opened his eyes, and found himself deep inside the magma field that he must have fallen into. It all made sense now, he had merged his life force with the planet’s, of course it couldn’t hurt him anymore. Gathering the Force around him, Gar propelled himself upwards, ripping through the magma without so much as a scald. Breaking the surface, he took a breath of fresh air and headed towards the shoreline. Though he was mortal, he had achieved unity with an entire planet; he could feel and interact with every rock, every molecule of lava. It was almost too much to process, and Gar allowed his mind to slowly return to his body, as he made his way back to his cave. However, that feeling of power would soon be replaced by the same want to leave the planet that he had maintained from his first day on the surface. What good was this knowledge if no one could listen? The supplies were dwindling fast, and the facility had begun to decay in earnest. Whole floors of food and water were swallowed up by the lava, as it was slowly reclaimed by the planet. While Gar might have had temporary unity with Mustafar, the lava swallowing up his food did not fill his stomach at all. In order to stretch out his survival, Gar would need to ration heavily, in addition to meditating deeply. He ended each day of meditation aching for escape, to feel anything new that was not this planet.

One night, Gar felt something that he had not felt since Palpatine left. A Force presence, or rather two.  _ This is it!  _ He thought.  _ Someone’s come back for me! _ He could sense the darkness emanating from one of the two presences, but he also felt something that perturbed him. Was that…  _ shame? _ Perhaps guilt? Certainly, this could not be Palpatine, for never once during his torture had Gar ever felt anything of the sort radiating from the man; only pure fear and anger had met him then. This dark presence felt much more inexperienced, much more  _ novice. _ And as for the other presence, he could swear he had felt it before. Inexplicably, memories of his days as a youngling surfaced now, and he felt the familiarity of this second figure. Using his connection to the planet, Gar monitored the two. He could sense that they were close, yet there was definite conflict between them. Cracking open the last water canteen, he savored the water, anticipating the rescue that would inevitably come.

All of his hopes were crushed when he felt the dark presence suddenly withdraw from the Force, and the other presence leave in a hurry. He felt defeated,  _ they had not come back for me after all _ . Letting out a primal scream, he shook the walls of his cave, letting some lava flow in from the ceiling. Out of water, it would only be a few days before he died of thirst. If he surrendered to Mustafar, he could draw that out for a few weeks, maybe even years. But what did it matter, when none of his knowledge could be transferred?  _ No. I will not let this be my final end.  _ He made one final trip to Palpatine’s abandoned facility, now mostly a shell of its former self, and he brought back equipment. If any Force wielders were ever again stranded here, Gar would give them a place to call home.  _ People should be able to learn the mysteries of this planet without needing to suffer as I did.  _ He thought, as he built a worktable that also served as an altar. Though his lightsaber was long gone, he made sure to include a tinkering kit,  _ so no Force wielder would be without a weapon while they learned from the planet. _ The cave itself completed, Gar needed a way for any lost souls to find this place, though he had a plan for this. 

He gathered the Force into his body one last time. The power coursing through him was astounding, Gar had never felt so much at one time. He could easily have moved mountains with a mere thought, parted the lava seas without breaking a sweat, but he knew that expending the energy gifted to him by the planet would be a wasted effort. Gar sat cross-legged on the floor of his cave, that had sheltered him so. He infused the walls,the altar, the very air, with this Force, with his life Energy. What life the planet had given him, he returned. Having seen the failure of both Jedi and Sith firsthand, Gar made sure that he maintained this location neutral, and that it only would reveal information that was necessary. As the last of Gar’s energy mingles with the cave, his body withered, though his mind remained, forever intertwined with Mustafar itself.

It would only be a few months until Gar Ignius’ cave would be used again, this time by a dark warrior seeking focus, brandishing a stolen lightsaber that he would bleed in the cave that called out to him so. 


End file.
